Tag Archives: Thimerosal

***Correction: Verstraeten study was published in 2003, not 2013 as stated in the video.

“This is a complete waste of everyone’s time. Every person involved in the dust-up has been a champion of our kids and they all deserve our respect. This is a movement fraught with tension, stress, and confusion. Time for everyone to grab their toys, leave the playground, take a deep breath, and get back to the task at hand.” – JB Handley dismissing the revelation by Autism Investigated’s editor that false representation to congressional staff was committed by SafeMinds.

Years ago, Generation Rescue founder JB Handley accused the wife of a known vaccine shill of secretly operating a neurodiversity blog. So confident was Handley, he even promised her a website he created to expose her husband’s lies on condition that she wasn’t the blog’s operator. Six months later, JB Handley turned over PaulOffit.com to Bonnie Offit. Eight years later, Handley still hasn’t learned his lesson about the importance of knowing stuff. His book How To End The Autism Epidemic proves it. Filled with inaccuracies, it’s reflective of just how out of depth JB Handley is on an issue that’s preoccupied his life for two decades.

His book gives disproportionate importance to events that happened this year, even as the epidemic has been raging for decades. Reading it, one might get the sense that the most important events all happened in 2018. The most featured study, for example, was published nine months ago. That, however, may partially explain why Handley gets some key facts wrong. He has a personal stake in committing the gravest error, however. In his book, JB Handley pushed the damaging myth that a doctor gave two conflicting expert opinions for different children seeking vaccine injury compensation. Although Dr. Andrew Zimmerman had expressed an opinion that compensated child Hannah Poling’s autism was caused by vaccination, he was never her expert witness. His opinion was also given after the concession.

A congressional hearing was almost held in 2013 over the falsehood that was spread by Canary Party. The hearing was cancelled after the falsehood was corrected by the Hannah Poling’s mother in the comments of the Age of Autism blog that Handley’s group sponsors. Congressional council then announced the hearing’s cancellation for being “overly divisive.” That clearly meant it would pit parent against parent. Autism Investigated broke the news of the cancellation. Instead of stating the real reason for the cancellation, Handley wrongly blamed a vaccine front group.

JB Handley played a role in the failure. Prior to the 2012 hearing, a lobbyist working for Canary Party Chairman Mark Blaxill falsely represented parent-scientist Brian Hooker to congressional staff. Handley dismissed the news entirely, calling it “a complete waste of everyone’s time” in the comments of Age of Autism. He then demanded “everyone…get back to the task at hand,” indicating Hooker and Blaxill should work together.

Mark Blaxill was subsequently discovered to have turned the autism omnibus attorneys against their own expert witnesses. He brutally smeared Dr. Mark and David Geier and even disparaged Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who would never be invited to testify. This was revealed publicly for the first time in emails shared with Autism Investigated. Even after all that, Handley’s support of Blaxill never wavered. Handley has a lot to answer for in his role of pushing Mark Blaxill on the movement against toxic vaccinations, contributing to the congressional failure.

Yet JB Handley goes even further than the cancelled hearing would have gone by demanding the father Jon Poling testify and be cross-examined about his daughter’s case by politicians. Yet Handley also acknowledges that the parents were given a $20 million concession to stay quiet. Strangely, he says that he wouldn’t begrudge other parents for doing exactly what the parents of Hannah Poling had already done. So why is he channeling the vaccine people by hitting her parents up for their daughter’s confidential medical information?

Though Poling is the worst example, there are other key facts that Handley gets wrong. For example, the senior author John Walker-Smith did not stand by the interpretation of the 1998 study as Handley falsely writes. Walker-Smith cosigned the fraudulent interpretation retraction with nine other coauthors. CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer Thomas Verstraeten also did not say his 2003 study of the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal was “neutral” with respect to autism, but rather with speech delays and tic disorders. He wanted to cover his autism findings up. These are not trivial errors to make, and both doctors are subsequently let off easy. The probable reason for the errors is simply that Handley did not give either study the attention it deserved when writing his book.

Finally, JB Handley has already taken criticism from many people because his book even recommends certain vaccines albeit far less than the current schedule. Handley later changed his position in a radio interview to say that you should have a right to get some vaccines if you want them. He obviously had not thought about that issue very hard. His below defense of the vaccine program on Facebook says it all, demanding of people vastly more knowledgeable than him: “unfriend me.”

It’s totally disingenuous of JB Handley to play the victim when he is trying to dictate the message of the movement with his ignorance. Why Handley demonstrates such poor knowledge of the issues surrounding the autism epidemic after apparently dedicating so many years to it is a mystery. He can’t think of effective policy solutions either. One explanation could be that he conflates ending the autism epidemic with ending his own son’s autism. Whatever the reason, his insistence on controlling the narrative of an issue he has so little understanding of is an unmitigated disaster.

One time Autism Investigated criticized him for saying the government studied “one vaccine and one ingredient” since it’s akin to saying the government ruled them out. He responded, “Don’t spread bullshit.”

Told that the government didn’t study them but rather lies about all vaccines, he grudgingly agreed with Autism Investigated.

Five cohort studies involving 1,256,407 children, and five case-control studies involving 9,920 children were included in this analysis. –Abstract of the clone-counting “meta-analysis”

Remember that “meta-analysis” mainstream media cites to claim vaccines were “proven” to not cause autism in over 1.2 million children when the paper actually double-counted every child born in Denmark over a six year period? The clone-counting paper is now being featured on the CDC’s website.

That bogus paper is hyperlinked directly from none other than CDC’s notorious “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism” webpage. Clicking on it will go directly to the abstract where the bogus “1,256,407” children number is tossed out.

Your tax dollars are being used to push fabricated figures in the name of vaccine safety, what else is new? Well the media has just slammed a newly elected congressman for criticizing the sacrosanct CDC’s vaccine deception. The media is citing that very webpage. The studies themselves are as bad as the meta-analysis pooled from them. The majority of children in the meta-analysis, for example, were part of a study in Denmark where the majority of autism cases started being counted as the mercury-based preservative thimerosal was removed from vaccines. All the others “dozens” of vaccine-autism link-disproving papers are as dishonest as that one. Of course the “meta-analysis” generated to repackage them would be too, as are the vaccine officials in government who promote it and the journalists who further lie about it.

CNN has just reposted a quote by Sanjay Gupta repeating the “1.2 million” myth, proving once again that it earned the title of fake news along with CDC.

In November 2002, an infamous rider was slipped into the Homeland Security Act which sought to shield former thimerosal maker Eli Lilly from litigation. But Lilly was not the pharmaceutical company behind the provision, European pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline was. The move enabled GSK to escape scrutiny over its toxic vaccinations. In GSK’s place was a company that had not made the mercury-based vaccine preservative for a decade and had not made childhood vaccines since the seventies.

Shielding Lilly from thimerosal litigation was done to protect vaccine manufacturers that use thimerosal, like GlaxoSmithKline. The rider was originally intended for a vaccine compensation bill pushed by then-Senator Bill Frist one year prior in response to rising lawsuits. His health policy adviser told Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2005:

“The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists.”

Although Frist received major contributions from Eli Lilly, he consistently enjoyed much greater financial support from GlaxoSmithKline. For the first five years that the thimerosal issue was raging, the company was Frist’s twelfth biggest campaign contributor. Merck was number 100. Lilly didn’t even make the top 100.

He was also far from GlaxoSmithKline’s only beneficiary. In mid-2002, GlaxoSmithKline was chief corporate sponsor of a GOP fundraiser in Washington headlined by President Bush.

Ultimately, Frist agreed to remove the rider from the law in January 2003. The repeal did not make Eli Lilly liable as all the thimerosal lawsuits would be forced into federal vaccine court anyway. However, the rider and subsequent fallout did help GlaxoSmithKline shirk public scrutiny.

The rider was slipped in two months before federal scientist-turned-GlaxoSmithKline employee Thomas Verstraeten submitted his thimerosal research for publication. The agreement to kill the rider happened just two weeks before Verstraeten’s submission. His earlier work for the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had shown associations between thimerosal and autism. He then heavily manipulated his research to make those associations go away. Much of his earlier manipulation was done in a draft he presented at a secret meeting between CDC and drug companies including his future employer.

After the publication of GlaxoSmithKline fraud, Verstraeten published a letter asserting an all-out denial of any cover-up. Another Glaxo-supported doctor had just engineered a fraudulent coauthor retraction of the interpretation from the seminal 1998 autism-vaccine paper the month prior. Unlike the retraction, the Verstraeten letter never made big news.

Attention was diverted from the pharmaceutical company covering up thimerosal’s dangers to another pharmaceutical company that hadn’t made it in a decade. All of that company’s employees who first brought thimerosal to market 70 years earlier were long dead.

Photo Credit: University College London, of which Royal Free is an affiliate

Autism Investigated spoke to an inside source of the Royal Free Hospital from when coauthors of Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 paper retracted its interpretation of a possible vaccine-autism link. That source has confirmed the hospital’s role in sanctioning the retraction and also implicated then-Head of Medicine Mark Pepys. Pepys forced Wakefield out of the Royal Free two years before the retraction.

When Autism Investigated asked if Pepys was personally involved, the source responded:

“It’s been so many years I can’t say for sure categorically, but I would expect so.”

The source also indicated Pepys was one of “two or three” Royal Free officials who supported the retraction. Prior to the retraction, the hospital released a statement signed by the Royal Free and University College Medical School’s Vice Chancellor lying that Andrew Wakefield concealed his work in vaccine injury litigation from the hospital.

Throughout Pepys’ time at the hospital, he enjoyed considerable support from GlaxoSmithKline and its precursor GlaxoWellcome. He would win the GlaxoSmithKline Prize in 2007 as well as a knighthood from the Queen in 2012 alongside the corporation’s CEO.

Mark Pepys has praised the use of medical records stolen from the Royal Free Hospital for GlaxoSmithKline-sponsored vaccine propaganda. Instead of investigating the theft, he “investigated” his own hospital’s doctors for doing their jobs. That’s because he leaked them just as he forced the Wakefield coauthors’ retraction.

The company also hired an epidemiologist while he was manipulating safety studies of the vaccine preservative thimerosal for CDC. A GlaxoSmithKline adviser was involved in an as-yet-failed attempt at making another CDC scientist recant his statements acknowledging evidence of a vaccine-autism link.

Just last week, a doctor who co-founded Britain’s Cochrane Collaboration was ejected from the organization he helped establish. His dismissal followed his criticism of Cochrane’s favorable review of HPV vaccination: another GSK market. GlaxoSmithKline’s name comes up an awful lot in vaccine issues, more so than any other pharmaceutical company it seems.

However, there have been no greater targets of attack by GlaxoSmithKline than Dr. Andrew Wakefield and the children in his paper whose medical records it stole. There is also no worse GlaxoSmithKline shill than Sir Mark Pepys.

Whenever they try to clear vaccines of causing autism, the vaccine people implicate them more. The latest fairy tale evidence used in favor of vaccination is yet more evidence implicating influenza vaccination in autism spectrum disorder.

Flu vaccination(circled) during pregnancy was one of the variables most strongly associated with Tdap vaccination during pregnancy, Source: Becerra-Culqui et al., Pediatrics, Figure 2

Last year, another large study by the health insurance industry showed influenza vaccination during pregnancy was associated with an increased ASD risk. This year, a study of Tdap ironically did the same by showing that not getting a flu vaccine was associated with a decreased risk for ASD among children whose pregnant mothers got the Tdap vaccine.

While the association was a decreased risk of 15%, last year’s influenza vaccine study showed a risk for ASD as high as 25% for first-trimester influenza vaccination.

The Tdap study is the second ASD-vaccine cohort study by Kaiser Permanente and the third by the insurance industry in the last three years. It is abundantly clear that as the increase in ASD continues, the insurance companies are increasingly going to have to pick up the tab. The doctors and drug companies are shielded from the litigation. The government won’t compensate for the ASD cases it caused. So the burden now falls on the health insurance industry.

And of course, the insurance industry gets pharma funding for vaccine studies. It is also a partner in the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink Project. Finally, influenza vaccinations still contain the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.

A large number of mothers in both groups got the Hg-containing flu vaccine, which makes this study practically worthless. But it helps your propaganda. https://t.co/vVudbDrhJN

We must redouble efforts to promote vaccination. The concerns discouraging some from vaccinating children have been exhaustively studied; and fully debunked by large, rigorous, definitive studies. We will reach a dangerous tipping point if science doesn’t prevail. #VaccinesWorkhttps://t.co/26NC2c7CR7

We are already at a dangerous tipping point, thanks to toxic vaccinations. Gottlieb cited propaganda of vaccine developer Peter Hotez, who has encouraged the importation of measles by opposing President Trump’s immigration policies. Hotez called vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccinationists a “hate group” and has written in favor of compulsory vaccination. He is in denial of his daughter’s vaccine injury.

Even Scott Gottlieb knows immigration can spread disease. Here is what Gottlieb wrote in 2008 (despite wrongly saying mercury is in the MMR vaccine):

…measles can still be imported from countries where its incidence is widespread. (The Brooklyn strain was probably introduced by immigrants.)

Gottlieb cites a man who wants to eliminate American borders to spread measles and scare people into poisoning their kids. Meanwhile, look who Gottlieb is seated next to: the former Maryland Secretary of Health who led attacks against vaccine scientists. Gottlieb said he “made transparency a priority at #FDA under his leadership.”

Enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with @drJoshS who made transparency a priority at #FDA under his leadership. Thank you for hosting me today at PEW to discus the topic and for your efforts. We’re fully committed to continuing to embrace and promote transparency at #FDApic.twitter.com/m076vor0gQ

Last year, Joshua Sharfstein wrote an article in JAMA vocally opposing the creation of a vaccine safety commission under President Trump. Entirely undisclosed in his article was the conspiracy Sharfstein led against two scientists for their views on vaccine safety while he was Maryland Secretary of Health. Autism Investigated subsequently contacted JAMA‘s editor-in-chief. JAMA‘s legal counsel responded instead.

Last year, you ran an article by Joshua Sharfstein that opposed the Trump Administration’s commitment to vaccine safety.(1) Dr. Sharfstein omitted that as Maryland Secretary of Health, he led state government attacks on two vaccine researchers for their opposition to thimerosal in vaccines.(2)(3) By the time of Sharfstein’s article, a court ruled that the department he led violated their confidentiality by posting public their medical information.(4) Just last February, that same board Sharfstein was in charge of was ordered to pay them $2.5 million for its actions under Sharfstein’s leadership. The ruling judge even compared the actions of Sharfstein’s board members and staff to Watergate:

“If their testimony were to be believed, which the court does not, it is the worst case of collective amnesia in the history of Maryland government and on par with the collective memory failure on display at the Watergate hearings.”(5)

Sharfstein acknowledges in his article that a vaccine safety commission under Trump would also concentrate on scientific integrity. He has much to lose professionally and personally from the formation of such a commission due to his department’s conspiracy against two scientists for their views on vaccines. Given AMA’s organizational stance against the commission, it is all the more pressing for Dr. Sharfstein to disclose his department’s attacks on two scientists for their vaccine skepticism when he defends the existing public health system that he is a part of in JAMA.

Sincerely,

Jake Crosby, MPH

Disclosure: I have done my epidemiology thesis on vaccine safety with the Geiers in 2013 and received funding from Autism Media Channel and Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute. I was also a paid campaign field representative and a volunteer for President Trump and other Republican candidates during the 2016 election cycle. I edit AutismInvestigated.com.

The Maryland Board of Physicians [MBOP] includes 22 members who are appointed by the Governor, not the state’s secretary of health. Complaints regarding Dr. Geier were filed with the MBOP years before Dr. Sharfstein was appointed Secretary. The documents you submitted and the timelines within them do not support the allegation that Dr. Sharfstein “led state government attacks on two vaccine researchers for their opposition to thimerosal in vaccines.”

Maryland’s Secretary of Health plays a direct role in the appointment of the majority of board members (boldface mine):

“11 practicing licensed physicians, including 1 Doctor of Osteopathy, appointed by the Governor with the advice of the Secretary of the Department of Health (MDH)”

“1 physician representative of MDH nominated by the Secretary“(1)

A vaccine activist filed a complaint against the board in 2006, but the board suspended Dr. Geier’s license in 2011 only months after Sharfstein’s appointment. That timeline absolutely implicates Sharfstein’s role. The suspension also cites the Institute of Medicine’s 2004 report that attacked Dr. Geier’s research. Sharfstein writes about IOM in his JAMA article:

“These reports blunted national concern and were one reason why the major outbreaks that occurred in Europe around that time (and since) have not been seen in the United States.“

Sharfstein also leaves out of the article, his JAMA bio and disclosure statement that he was elected a fellow of IOM in 2014.

Not only does the timeline of Sharfstein’s appointment correlate with Dr. Geier’s suspension, but Sharfstein’s resignation correlates with court decisions against the board. He announced in July 2014 that he would step down at the end of the year. According to the Professional Licensing Report article I cited, a board representative stood up a deposition by the Geiers’ attorney in June of 2014. The court would then grant the “ultimate sanction” in favor of the Geiers in December 2014, two weeks before Sharfstein actually stepped down.(2)

Joshua Sharfstein is completely conflicted. The kind of behavior his department engaged in and the fact that AMA’s and other physician groups’ positions are influenced by people like him is exactly why we need an independent commission to look into vaccines. Until that happens, I think the public should oppose them entirely.

Sincerely,

Jake Crosby, MPH

1. About the Board, Maryland Board of Physicians, Maryland Department of Health. Accessed June 8, 2018.

The total sample evaluated among these cohort studies consisted of 1,256,407 children. WRONG

A widely reported, pro-vaccine meta-analysis of papers by vaccine promoters double-counted every child born in Denmark between 1991 and 1996. As a result, it was erroneously reported as being a study of over 1.2 million children by Autism Speaks, CNN, Forbes and David “Orac” Gorski among other bastions of integrity.

In “Vaccines are not associated with autism: an evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies,” the authors estimated the total number of children in the cohort studies by adding up the samples of each study. The problem is that the two largest studies used mostly the same children, as the first table in the meta-analysis makes clear.

Here is one study population description:

All children born in Denmark from January 1990 until December 1996

Here is another:

All children born in Denmark from January 1991 through December 1998

Every child born in Denmark from January 1991 to December 1996 was double-counted. As a result, the authors calculated the total children who participated in all five studies as numbering 1,256,407.

That number is completely bogus. It is not even possible to calculate an estimate of the number of children who participated in either Danish study by reviewing the published manuscripts. Not surprisingly, the authors’ grasp of the material they analyzed reflects their grasp of the vaccine issue overall.

…due to the controversial nature of the topic and the high volume of publication on this issue for both sides of the argument it is unlikely that so many papers on one side of the argument (that would have met our inclusion criteria) remain unpublished.

It is precisely because this issue is controversial that “so many papers on one side of the argument” don’t get published! There’s literally an entire website dedicated to unpublished study results showing that mercury in vaccines causes autism. You publish anything critical of vaccines, it is at imminent risk of retraction for criticizing vaccines. You submit even a letter to the editor saying that someone else’s study linked vaccines to autism, your letter gets canned.

Don’t worry about it though, because the senior author of the pro-vaccine meta-analysis is a cautious parent. His two oldest children got febrile seizures after vaccines, so what does he do? He vaccinates his youngest anyway after giving the child Tylenol.

My first two children have had febrile seizures after routine vaccinations, one of them a serious event. These events did not stop me from vaccinating my third child, however, I did take some proactive measures to reduce the risk of similar adverse effects. I vaccinated my child in the morning so that we were aware if any early adverse reaction during the day and I also gave my child a dose of paracetamol 30 min before the vaccination was given to reduce any fever that might develop after the injection. As a parent I know my children better than anyone and I equate their seizures to the effects of the vaccination by increasing their body temperature.

The use of acetaminophen in babies and young children may be much more strongly associated with autism than its use during pregnancy, perhaps because of well-known deficiencies in the metabolic breakdown of pharmaceuticals during early development. Thus, one explanation for the increased prevalence of autism is that increased exposure to acetaminophen, exacerbated by inflammation and oxidative stress, is neurotoxic in babies and small children. This view mandates extreme urgency in probing the long-term effects of acetaminophen use in babies and the possibility that many cases of infantile autism may actually be induced by acetaminophen exposure shortly after birth.

This is why so many more kids got hurt and killed by vaccines in the eighties. This is also why you can’t sue vaccine makers. It’s why combined vaccines like MMR are much more in vogue and why the schedule has expanded so much.

The airhead at Voxwho interviewed him conveniently left all that out. He said vaccine injuries were fake. In fact, they’re real. Reporting that truth is what got a doctor disbarred. The decision itself said so (p. 43):

You knew or ought to have known that your reporting in the Lancet paper of a temporal link between the syndrome you described and the MMR vaccination, i. had major public health implications, ii. would attract intense public and media interest.

No wonder vaccines are causing so much harm. No wonder people look the other way as the government blatantly lies. Overt censorship of any reasonable concern about them is acceptable.

Poul Thorsen was indicted in 2011 when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. He was principal investigator of U.S. government-supported papers that sought to exonerate thimerosal in vaccines and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine of causing autism. His MMR paper published in NEJMclaimed:

There was no association between the age at the time of vaccination, the time since vaccination, or the date of vaccination and the development of autistic disorder.

This graph computed from Thorsen’s results by an independent statistician shows otherwise.

(ICD-9 definition of Childhood Autism incorporated into registry in 1994, hence the disparity with ASD)

It may never be known what Hillary Clinton was thinking in relation to Thorsen as State Secretary. However, she sure made clear what her position on vaccination and Thorsen’s colleagues would be as president during the election cycle.

As president, I will work closely with the talented physicians, nurses, and scientists in our US Public Health Service to speak out and educate parents about vaccines, focusing on their extraordinary track record in saving lives and pointing out the dangers of not vaccinating our children.